What is self-defense? I make my college students write an essay on this for part of their final, the point being that most people don’t think of self-defense as much more than kicking and punching. Throughout the course, hopefully they come to realize that self-defense includes many more skills and considerations: awareness and avoidance, boundary setting and deterrence, the legal, social, and psychological consequences of your actions. These considerations need to guide our strategies and techniques. If you work with your hands and get into a fight, it is hard to feed your family after a surgery to put pins in your broken hands. Or another example, paying tens of thousands of dollars in court costs to prove you were justified all along would still be an inconvenience in your life. But this review process should go much further.
In our martial arts classes we frequently refer to the DO—or way of life—aspect. We take the respect, discipline, fighting spirit, and other important qualities that martial arts gives us on the mat and apply them in other areas of our lives. This same process should be applied to self-defense as well!
We recently had one of our black belts, Christian Marion, give the Heimlich to one of his friends. I found out via his mom, Lita, when she sent me this message, “I didn’t know that he even knew how. He said that he learned at Gentry. So thank you for offering first aid and cpr classes.” Now, I am really glad things worked out, but I am not trying to take credit for anything. That wasn’t what we were thinking about when we trained out staff and others. But it does illustrate a much larger point: protecting yourself and your loved ones goes way beyond learning how to kick butt and/or shoot well.
In our lil dragons program, we teach life skills like basic hygiene and first aid (wash your hands, don’t share combs, etc.), what to do in a fire, how to cross the street, and basic stranger danger concepts. We make them learn their address, phone number, and parents name (besides mom and dad). At that age, self-defense is not about surviving a street brawl, but rather navigating the world around them safely. Things really don’t change that much.
People should know basic first aid and what to do in emergencies. As my daughter nears driving age, I can assure you she will know how to change a flat tire before she gets her license. Someone whose blood pressure is out of control is more of a danger to himself than a theoretical bad guy hiding in the bushes.
And we should extrapolate this process well beyond impacting our physical bodies. Personally, I think anybody who doesn’t have some form of identity theft protection is crazy. Is your family protected with adequate life insurance? Being willing to take a bullet for them isn’t so helpful or noble if not. Do you have basic emergency preparedness in the event of a storm or disaster?
Unless you are a pretty horrible person involved in some pretty shady stuff, chances are we are more of a danger to ourselves than some potential bad guy. We are more likely to get into a car wreck from texting than being carjacked. We need to spend more time preparing for when life happens than when an assault happens.
Now, I don’t mean to come across too judgmental or suggest I have it all together. In martial arts training, we would all like to dedicate more time and resources into training if we could, to make sure we had even more of our basis covered. Similarly, not everyone has the time or resources to cover everything. But I encourage you to take a look at the holes in your game—where you and your family are exposed, and do what you can to correct it. Even if you don’t step on the mats, I hope you get some self-defense practice in today. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go work on my will —BLS
Gentry Martial Arts--the rants of a martial arts eccentric 